A Search engine start-up by a few ex-Google employees has just launched called Cuil (pronounced Cool according to them).
It has an interesting 2 or 3 column magazine style layout that is very different to any other search engine. One thing that struck us was that it looks like a single column might be designed to fit on an iPhone or other smart phone screen, which is interesting as it means they have 95% of the work done already to display nicely on mobile devices.
Cuil claims a large number of pages indexed, but a lot of people are reporting that the relevancy of the answers returned by the search engine leave a lot to be desired. It is als very US centric, having problems with sites outside of the USA. One well known SEO, Jill Whalen, commented “Nice! Search results like it’s 1995!”
Some of our test searches returned no results at all but when tried later they worked. Sometimes results are full of low quality spam pages and sometimes NSFW porn images.
It is early days so far for Cuil and its availability is patchy. When we where testing it on launch day, it kept going down every few minutes.
It will be interesting to see how Cuil develops and if it does manage to make any headway against the 900lb search gorilla that is Google.
UK businesses are cutting their marketing and advertising budgets for the third quarter in a row according to the latest Bellwether report, the quarterly survey of marketing budgets. The report also forecasts further cuts later in the year, citing disappointing sales, rising costs and growing economic gloom.
All sectors of marketing saw budget cuts with the exception of the internet. However, even this saw the smallest upward revision since 2003, with 19% of companies reporting a rise from the budgets set at the start of the year. A dramatic slowdown since the first quarter of 2008, when 27% of respondents reported an increase in their online marketing budgets since the start of the year.
Chris Williamson, Bellwether report author and chief economist at financial analyst firm Markit, said, “Rising costs and weaker-than-expected sales put pressure on companies to cut marketing budgets in the second quarter to protect profit margins.” Adding “This raises the possibility that marketing spend could fall this year for the first time since the survey began in 2000.”
However, Anthony Wreford, the deputy chairman for US marketing services company Omnicom Europe, said he expected internet marketing to rise, adding “Internet spending will continue to grow as more clients see the importance of this form of communication.”
Whether you have a simple webpage, a blog or a fully-fledged dynamic website, new visitors to your site will either stay and read more or leave and never return based on some very subjective criteria. Not least of these is the “look and feel”. If your site looks “right” they will most likely read a little further, if it looks “wrong” you’ve lost them before you’ll lose them right there. For this reason, it is vitally important that your site “feels right”.
One of the most important, and unfortunately one of the most overlooked, is font selection. Choosing the right font can go a long way towards attracting the visitor you need, while choosing the wrong one can give the wrong impression entirely.
Helpful souls that we are here at THUK, we have created a handy little webpage where you can experiment with some of the more common fonts and see what they all look like. Furthermore, we have scoured the web for you and found this guide to web safe fonts, to help you chose the best font for your site.
